110 ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES

hence modifies the demand for various groups of commodities,
 including agricultural produce. Apart from this
effect, demand for produce would not be changed by a
cessation of rent payments. Now, if neither supply nor
demand be changed, the value of the produce must be unaffected
 by the system which places rents in the ownership
of a class differing from the class of cultivators of the soil.
The preceding argument is a not altogether satisfactory
presentation of the case in favour of the proposition that
“rent does not enter into cost of production,” that is, into
that cost of production which determines, or at any rate
registers, value.
Recurring to the theme of an earlier part of this chapter,
it may be recalled that, with a growing demand for produce,
land of lower degrees of fertility needed to be cultivated.
[t was the need for more produce which made it necessary to
submit to the greater expense of raising it from inferior soils,
not the need of paying rent for superior soils. The power
of securing a rent for the better soils was a consequence of
the need of resorting to the inferior, not the cause of such
action. The same is true if we deal with intensive cultivation
instead of extensive. The need for raising more produce
from the same soil, in addition to what has previously been
secured, leads to a submission to a less produce for the same
expense, or a greater expense for an equal amount of
produce, added to the old. Rentability is a result of such
resort to less profitable modes of cultivation, and it is not the
demand for rent which compels resort to the less fruitful
expenditures. Such resort could not be avoided if every
cultivator owned the soil he cultivated, provided the demand
for produce rendered it necessary to resort to inferior
soils, or to intensive culture of the superior, It is this that
is meant by saying that rent does not enter into cost of
production,
In reference to some recent attempts to extend the
statement to interest and wages, on the ground of analogies
between rent and return to capital already noticed, and
similar analogies to be noticed in the next chapter, it may
suffice to repeat a statement already made. In the case of